Rule-breaking Women from History Helped Me Forgive my Mother

The women from history took me by the hand and their own remarkable histories made me want to try to articulate my mother’s legacy and, in so doing, close the book on hurtful beliefs that I had held as gospel for so long.

For
me, it has always been about women and their stories. I just didn’t realize
that one day I would be the writer of one.

In midlife, a wild goose chase of sorts had
taken hold of me as I strove to finally understand my
glamorous, outside-the-lines mother
who I’d lost more than twenty years before. As I peeled back the layers,
secrets, and illusions of our relationship, I came face-to-face with some
uncomfortable truths. Realizations about the two of us that turned me upside
down and inside out were constantly looping in my mind.

Then,
I took a trip to London and found myself strolling through the National
Portrait Gallery looking into the eyes of unconventional women from the eighteenth
century. These ancient portraits of trailblazers and groundbreakers seemed
oddly familiar, particularly one of eighteenth-century actress Mrs. Jordan, who
shared my mother’s first name and her fiery nature.

I
circled among their portraits, reading the biographical information below each
piece, enthralled by the faces and accomplishments of these women, all of whom
had lived in Europe in the late 1700s. They had made remarkable strides at a
time when little was expected from them; when they had few rights; when they’d had
to navigate enormous cultural obstacles to achieve anything.

They
were novelists, playwrights, actresses, painters, musicians, and
Bluestockings—all of them outliers, mavericks, and trailblazers who had
accomplished much despite the restrictive rules of the day. At a time when the
appearance of convention was everything,
nonconformists like Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, Fanny Burney,
Germaine de Stael, Hannah More, and Angelica Kauffmann somehow knew that
forward motion required unconventionality. And they all seemed to be whispering
to me: Write. Write about us. Write about
your mother.

When
I got back to New York, I read everything I could find about them and soon
realized that skirting the rules in place in order to survive and thrive—rules
they didn’t make but had to live by—was the constant between all of them.

Their
common backbone—a shared root system that connected one to the other—gave me a
new frame through which to view my mother and myself. Each one of them had had
her share of illusions, dashed hopes and scandalous truths just like my
mother—yet these mavericks had all managed to transform their pain into some
sort of progress to pave the way for generations to come.

Curiously, spending time with them began to
feel like spending time with my mother. The reasoning behind their choices
helped me to understand how and why my mother had managed to sculpt herself in
another era so different from my own, and to see beyond how her decisions had
affected me personally.

Through
their life stories, I gained an appreciation for the struggles these kindred
spirits faced as they strove to become who they wanted to be. Their basic
desires—to be fully heard and seen, to have rights, to live an independent life
outside of the domestic sphere—are something that American women take for
granted today—but in my mother’s day and theirs, they required nothing less
than a major act of rebellion to achieve.

My
mother was born at the start of the Great Depression to a downtrodden mother
and a bitter, alcoholic father. It was a world within which she had no control,
so she created a new one—a world of her truths, her secrets, her rules, within
which she was its queen. The anointed celebrity. As was the case with all of these other women
from history, the limiting rules of the day and the life she had been
handed simply didn’t suit my mother, and she had had to carve out her own path.

These
early mavericks made me newly grateful for all of my mother’s unconventionality. Even
though as a child I had wished feverishly that she was more like other mothers—the
ones who were present, who reminded their daughters to wear galoshes and eat
vegetables—I now saw her in a new way. She had provided not only a roadmap for me but also modeled the resilience and aptitude
needed to navigate life with all its hurdles. Because of her, I emerged as a
strong woman as well.

And from there, my memoir was
born. The women from
history took me by the hand and their own remarkable histories made me want to
try to articulate my mother’s legacy and, in so doing, close the book on
hurtful beliefs that I had held as gospel for so long.

Most
of all, they gave me permission to both see and admire my mother for exactly
who she was—and for that, they have my eternal gratitude.

Deborah
Burns is the author of “Saturday’s Child,” a memoir about growing up with her
unconventional mother that will be published in April 2019. Hailed as a
must-read for every daughter who’s ever wondered where her mother ended and she
begins, and by Kirkus Reviews as “Devilishly sharp … a masterful balance of
psychological excavation and sumptuous description,” this PopSugar Top Ten 2019
debut is available for pre-order now on Amazon and everywhere books are sold.

Deborah Burns is a former Chief Innovation Office and brand leader for ELLEgirl, ELLE Décor, Metropolitan Home, and ELLE Global Marketing. Now a media industry consultant, she helps brands, executives, and professional women reinvent themselves through her expertise, coaching process, and website, skirtingtherules.com, which she founded. Beneath her business leader exterior, however, always beat the heart of a writer, and several years ago she began the creative journey to write Saturday’s Child and tell her mother’s story. She lives on Long Island, New York with her husband and their three children.

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